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When a family in a novel moves into a house that’s starting to fall down, you can bet money there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. When the novel’s title is Unsheltered, you’ve got an unambiguous statement of intent. Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel is clearly inspired by the crisis of Trump’s America, but it is also about what it might mean to live when previously trusted ideologies or economic systems are challenged to breaking point, and what might follow in their wake.

In fact, Unsheltered contains not just one disintegrating house but two, built on the same plot of land in New Jersey and housing two different families 150 years apart. In early 2016, in the last months of Obama’s presidency,...

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